The East Germans are now more free than we are, at least in terms of law and administrative practice in such areas as surveillance and data collection. Thirty years ago, they had the Stasi. Today, Britain has such broadly drawn and elastic surveillance laws that Poole borough council could exploit them to spend two weeks spying on a family wrongly accused of lying on a school application form.

The German electronics company Siemens has developed a complete “surveillance in a box” system they are marketing to government intelligence and police agencies “…in Europe and Asia”. (No sales to America? Really?? I’d love to see the internal memo to Sales about that)

New Scientist says the Intelligence Platform has already been sold the to 60 countries. [Background for puzzle fans: Europe contains 52 countries, Asia 43. Yes, this includes the Vatican and Timor-Leste]

According to a document obtained by New Scientist, the system integrates tasks typically done by separate surveillance teams or machines, pooling data from sources such as telephone calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions and insurance records. It then sorts through this mountain of information using software that Siemens dubs “intelligence modules”.